Request: Document the isanswered
search parameter on the advanced search help page.
Update
This has been implemented by adding the following to the help page:
isanswered: yes/true/1 returns only questions that have at least one accepted or positively-scored answer; no/false/0 returns only questions with no accepted or positively-scored answers.
Unfortunately, the above is incorrect: acceptances are ignored by this search. The correct description would be:
isanswered: yes/true/1 returns only questions that have at least one positively-scored answer; no/false/0 returns only questions with no positively-scored answers.
Rationale
From time to time users ask about searching for questions that are unanswered-in-SE-sense (no accepted answer and no positively scored answer). For example, Deduplicator asked yesterday:
What about adding a new operator to search, which restricts the same way as the unanswered page?
The older thread on this is How to search unanswered questions where the answers include: using hasaccepted:0
, using answers:0
. There is also a feature request there to have ascore:0
parameter to handle the presence of answers with positive score.
Yet, all this time SE did have a search parameter for filtering questions based on answer score: isanswered
. As m0sa explained, its logic is actually hasAnswerWithScoreGreaterThanZero
Thus, the combination isanswered:0 hasaccepted:0 closed:0
matches SE definition of an unanswered question.
For example, this search nearly matches the questions/unanswered view on Stack Overflow. (The numbers are not exactly the same, either because of caching or because of some narrow edge cases; for practical purposes the results are the same.
One can now filter by tags and/or question score, then sort by dates, etc... like you always wanted. For example, when I'm feeling generous, I combine this search with intags:mine
and answers:1..
to review answers on unanswered questions and maybe upvote them, taking the question out of unanswered.